Salvation – Crossing Over – Part 6

And now, O Lord, shine within our hearts with the true light of Your divine knowledge. Open the eyes of our minds that we might comprehend the message of Your Word. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.

Throughout this Lenten season we’ve been talking about how
we can know for certain whether we’re saved. And for the past couple of weeks
we’ve been talking about the doctrine of election: the idea that God chooses
some people over others before they’re ever even born. We’ve already seen that
God chose a man named Abraham to be the father of a people whom God has chosen
to be used “to be a blessing to all the
families of the earth” (Genesis 12:2).
And we see right here the purpose of God’s election—it’s never about
loving this person over that person, it’s always about a particular person or
people that God intends to use to bless others.

Now Abraham and Sarah are old and when they get tired of
waiting for God to give them a child, they take matters into their own hands
and Abraham has a son by Sarah’s servant, Hagar. A son that they name Ishmael
and Abraham thinks that now he has his heir. But he has neglected to understand
that God chose not only Abraham but also Sarah to be the parents of the one
through whom God’s chosen people will be descended. We don’t know why God
chooses Isaac, the only son of Sarah, over Ishmael—and over the six other sons
that Abraham will father after Sarah dies. We only know that He does. And then
when Isaac and his wife Rebekah have twin boys, God chooses Jacob over his
brother Esau. Jacob has twelve sons, all of whom are a part of God’s people.
But of them, God elects Judah, son number four, to be the one from whom Jesus
will be descended.

Jacob has known about the God of his father and grandfather
all his life. But it is only when he learns that his brother Esau, who had
threatened to kill Jacob the last time they saw one another, is now coming with
400 men, that Jacob, afraid not only for his life, but also for that of his
wives and his children, wrestles with God all night long and finally comes to
know God personally. And God tells gives Jacob a new name—Israel.

Eventually God uses Israel’s son Joseph and a drought to
move Israel and all of his sons their families to Egypt—because God wants to use
His chosen people to show the world the glory of their great God. Joseph moves
everyone in the family to Egypt—seventy people plus the wives of Joseph’s
brothers (Genesis 46:26-27). Israel dies in Egypt and that’s where the book of
Genesis ends.

We turn the page in our Bibles to the book of Exodus and
discover that 400 years have passed. Joseph is long dead and nobody in Egypt
remembers him anymore or cares about how he saved the nation. But the Israelite
people are still there; we’re told that “they
multiplied and grew exceedingly strong, so that the land was filled with them”
(Exodus 1:7). But now they’re in bondage. Bondage to Pharaoh, who’s made them
his slaves, forcing them to work long hours under the hot Egyptian sun, making
bricks with ever increasing quotas.

Now there’s nothing really special about these descendants
of Israel—they’re just another Middle Eastern people, common laborers. Except,
of course, for the fact that they were chosen by God for a purpose. Chosen to “be a blessing to the nations.” Chosen
for reasons that have nothing to do with the merits of the Israelites
themselves.

God had a plan, as we talked about last week—a plan that He
purposed before He created this world and the universe in which it exists. A
plan, that from the very beginning, included sending His Son into the world to
live among us and then to die on a cross and rise from the dead.

And God’s rescue of these ordinary Israelite people from
slavery in Egypt was part of that plan. Moses, the plagues, the Passover—all
were part of God’s great salvation plan.

2000 years before the infant Jesus was born in a stable in
Bethlehem, God sent a sign—a sign like a huge, bright, blazing billboard of a
sign—foreshadowing and pointing to the mission of the Christ Child.

I want you to think about this for a minute. If we were
somehow able to travel back in time 4000 years and talk to one of these
Israelites, after they had been rescued from slavery, crossed the Red Sea and
were on their wilderness journey to the Promised Land of Canaan, and we were
able to ask them what had happened to them, they might have replied this way:
“I was in bondage in a foreign land, under sentence of death, but I took
shelter under the blood of the lamb and was set free from bondage and death. Then
we crossed over, and now we’re on our way to the Promised Land. We’re not there
yet, but God’s given us His law to make us a community. And He’s given us the
Tabernacle because you have to live by grace and forgiveness. His presence is
in our midst, and He’s promised to stay with us until we finally make it home.”

4000 years ago—Jesus has not yet been born, but already He’s
at work in the world setting His people free. Because aren’t these pretty much
the same words that we would use to describe what Jesus has done for us?

Salvation is all about getting us out of bondage. That’s
what the word redemption means.

So 4000 years ago in ancient Egypt, after a series of
plagues that pretty much destroyed the nation, there came that final awful Passover
night when the angel of death traveled through the entire nation killing the eldest
son in every single Egyptian household—and not a single Israelite son was
killed. And finally, Pharaoh told the Israelites to go. To get out of Egypt—now.
We’re told later in Numbers 1:46 that there were 604,550 Israelite men plus
women and children, so there were likely at least a million people who quickly gathered
up their belongings and marched out of Egypt. But instead of heading North,
which might have seemed the more logical route, God tells them to go south and
they end up in the wilderness.

This wasn’t because they’d somehow gotten God’s directions
wrong, but because they’d gotten them exactly right.

Now we’re told by the author of Hebrews that Moses somehow
was special even as an infant. Pharaoh had ordered all the Israelite baby boys
to be killed at birth, but when his daughter found the baby Moses in a basket
on the Nile, she took him home and adopted him. So Moses was raised in
Pharaoh’s palace as a member of the royal family. Apparently, however, he
didn’t forget His Jewish roots because one day, when he was 40 years old, Moses
saw an Egyptian beating a Israelite and he intervened, killing the Egyptian. When
Pharaoh heard about it, he wanted to kill Moses, so Moses fled to the land of
Midian, where he spent the next 40 years. Living the life of a simple shepherd,
“enduring as seeing him who is
invisible,” according to Hebrews 11:27.

Moses endured—did he know that God had bigger things in mind
for him? The author of Hebrews seems to think so. He could have used the
Egyptian’s attack on the Hebrew as an opportunity to stir up a revolt among the
Israelite people; with his leadership and their huge numbers, the Israelite
slaves would have had a good chance of success. But unlike Abraham and Sarah,
who got tired of waiting for God to act and took matters into their own hands to
get the son that God had promised them, Moses simply waited; he went to Midian
and waited—for forty years. When God finally called Him, Moses was 80 years
old. Then he waited through nine plagues—waited and allowed God to work.

And finally, the final plague, the Passover. The Passover,
where we see the angel of death pass by every house where he saw the blood of a
lamb over the doorpost. Strange as it must have seemed to him, Moses believed
God’s promise that this protection would work, and it did. Even Pharaoh’s
firstborn son lay dead the next morning, along with thousands of others. But among
the Israelites, not a single soul perished, exactly as Moses had predicted. The
Egyptians begged the Israelites to leave, even heaping treasure upon them to
speed them on their way.

Pharaoh and the Egyptians had repeatedly refused to obey
God’s commands, but that night every single Israelite obeyed God’s command to
mark the entrance to their house with the blood of the Passover lamb. The
instructions were strange, the demand was difficult (a lamb without blemish),
and the ritual was unlike any they’d ever seen or heard—nevertheless, they did
exactly as they were told.

It wasn’t that the Israelite people were somehow better than
the Egyptians—it’s simply that they were obedient. At least in this instance.
Pharaoh had repeatedly—ten times—refused to obey God’s command to let the
people go.

So the Israelites headed out—but then the Egyptians changed
their minds and decided that they’d made a huge mistake. So Pharaoh called out “600 chosen chariots and all the other
chariots of Egypt” (Exodus 14:7) and his entire army and they headed out to
either bring back the Israelites or kill them.

Now we’re told in Exodus 13:18 that “the people of Israel went up out of the land of Egypt equipped for
battle,” but when they saw the Egyptian army pursuing them they were
terrified. They had reached the shores of the Red Sea and now they were trapped
with the sea in front of them and Pharaoh’s army closing in behind them.

What were they to do? What could they do? “The people of Israel cried out to the Lord”
(Exodus 14:10)

Then they complained to Moses: “Didn’t we tell you that this
was a big mistake? Didn’t we tell you to leave us alone and let us serve the
Egyptians?” Now of course they hadn’t actually said any of those things—they
were all for getting out of Egypt. Until things got difficult.

“And Moses said to the
people, ‘Fear not, stand firm, and see the salvation of the Lord. … The Lord will
fight for you, and you have only to be silent’” (Exodus 14:13-14).

And God told Moses, “Tell
the people of Israel to go forward. Raise your staff and stretch out your hand
over the sea to divide the water.” Now again, this must have seemed
impossible, but by faith Moses obeyed, and we’re told that the waters were
driven back all night by a powerful east wind. And Hebrews 11:29 says that “by faith the people crossed the Red Sea on
dry land.”

By faith—what does that mean? A million people are crossing
over—and they’re crossing the Red Sea. There are differing views on just how
long this took, but pretty much everyone who’s studied this agrees that the
crossing took a least several hours and probably longer. So men and women and
children are walking between these rolled back walls of water for hours. And as
they walked, surely some of them were thinking, “Wow! God is great! When God
said He’d fight for us, we never imagined anything like this!” (Those are the
people who today would spend their vacations bungee jumping and whitewater
rafting and engaging in other extreme sports.) At the same time, there were
other people walking between those two walls of water, thinking, “I’m going to
die. We’re all going to die. We’re never going to make it.”

Those people crossed over the Red Sea on dry land with
greatly varying qualities of faith. But all of them crossed over—they were all
equally saved. Because we’re not saved based on the quality of our faith. We’re
saved based on the object of our faith—our Redeemer, our God who is fighting
for us.

And then when the Egyptians tried to follow them across,
Moses stretched out his staff and the waters returned, drowning the entire
Egyptian army. Exodus 14:30 says, “Thus
the Lord saved Israel that day from the hand of the Egyptians, and Israel saw
the Egyptians dead on the seashore.”

Because the Egyptians tried to cross over with zero faith.
Their faith was in Pharaoh—and God is making it known who it is that has a
right to claim ownership to the Israelite people. Not the enslaving king who
had long been their master—but the divine Lord who had come to Egypt for the
purpose of claiming, redeeming and delivering them.

Standing on the shore of the Red Sea with the army fast
approaching, the future of Israel was at stake—and the people were in no
position to settle the matter one way or another. The Lord God had determined,
however, that they were His chosen people and so He delivered them with His
mighty arm.

Pretty soon, however, if you keep reading the book of
Exodus, you’ll find the Israelite people complaining again. They complain about
the food, about the lack of water … complain, complain, complain.

“We’re going to die in the wilderness—and it’s all your
fault, Moses. You and that God of yours.”

Brothers and sisters in Christ, the Israelite people are a
picture of us. They were in bondage—but there was more than one layer to their
bondage. They’ve been rescued from one of those layer of bondage, their slavery
to the Egyptians. But in their hearts, they were still slaves. You can take the
people out of slavery, but it’s harder to take the slavery out of people.

God had delivered the Israelite people through a series of
miraculous events—the plagues, the Passover, the parting of the Red Sea, the
destruction of the Egyptian army. But still the people complained—complained
that God wasn’t doing enough. And their complaining was sin. They had been set
free from slavery to the Egyptians, but they were still in bondage to sinful
habits.

Like us—because even when we accept Christ—even when Christ
accepts us—we’re still in bondage to sinful habits.

Moses climbs Mt. Sinai to meet with God, to receive the Ten
Commandments, and the people get tired of waiting for him to come back down.
They make a golden calf to worship. You might not have a golden calf that you
bow down to, but, like them, we’re still in bondage to idols, too. Because if
we love anything more than God—even if that thing is our own sense of security
or desire for comfort or significance, that thing is a false god—it’s an idol.
It’s a power in our life, a power that, like Pharaoh, is continually saying,
“Serve me or die.”

When the Israelites are on the banks of the Red Sea, Pharaoh
is no longer their master. He said, “Go,” and they did. But now he says, “I
want you back.” This happens to all of us. It can be our career, our children,
our spouse, our finances—it can even be worry or anxiety that we’re in bondage
to. When the Israelites were on the banks of the Red Sea, God said that He
would fight for them—but then He told them to “go forward.” They couldn’t just
stand there, paralyzed by fear.

If you believe that your value, your worth, is determined by
how good you are at doing your job or being a parent or a spouse or managing
your finances, those things have become an idol. And when problems occur, we’re
paralyzed with fear because our old master is there saying, “Serve me or die.
You need me. You can’t live without me.” And even though we’ve given our life
to Christ, even though we’ve been redeemed by the blood of the Lamb, we’re
still terrified.

We know that we’ve been saved—and at the same time, we’re
not sure. We know we should be free. We know in our head
that there’s no condemnation in Christ Jesus, that by faith we have been saved.
But in our heart we don’t fully believe it. And all too often we let what other
people think of us, or our success or failure in marriage or our work or other
relationships either build us up or destroy us. We do this because our hearts
are still enslaved. God has freed us from the things we remain enslaved to, but
we just haven’t yet fully grasped that reality.

Many of you have read the book Same Kind of Different as Me or seen the movie that tells the story
of Denver Moore, the homeless black man who become a famous artist and speaker
after being befriended by Debbie Hall and her husband Ron. Denver was born in
1937 on a southern plantation, and although the slaves in this country had been
emancipated since 1863, Denver and his family worked the cotton fields with
little or no pay, living in a way that was no different from generations of
slaves before them. Denver was an adult before he realized that he was a free
man and didn’t have to stay on the plantation.

And even after he knew that he had rights, when a white
person yelled at him, he was still scared. He still acted like a slave.

We struggle with a similar kind of bondage. Even though we
have been set free from sin by the shed blood of Jesus Christ, the blood of the
perfect Lamb of God, we continue to struggle with sin and guilt. Just being
told that “If you believe in Jesus Christ, your sins are forgiven, there’s no
condemnation for you, you are accepted—you have been adopted into the family of
God,” isn’t enough. That’s why we go back to trying to earn our salvation,
trying to be perfect.

Even though we know in our head that because we have
believed in Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, we’re not in bondage to the
law anymore, we’re still in bondage subjectively.

In Christ’s finished work we have already been freed from
the penalty of sin. But we’re still in the process of getting free from the
power of sin, even though we know that we will eventually be free from the very
presence of sin. That’s justification, sanctification and glorification.

Jesus’ salvation is about getting out of bondage. And how do
we get there? We get there by crossing over by grace.

In Exodus 14:13-14, Moses tells the Israelites who are
crying out, “Fear not. Stand firm and see
the salvation of the Lord.” He says, “The Lord will fight for you. The Lord
will deliver you.”

This is what grace is: it’s understanding that you can’t do
it. You can’t deliver yourself. You
can’t even contribute anything to it. But if you stand firm, God will do it for
you—He has promised to do it for you.

Romans 4:5 “And to the
one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith
is counted as righteousness”—sounds a lot like “Stand firm, and see the salvation of the Lord which he will work for
you today.”

“Be still and know
that I am God.” Receive salvation not by anything you do but by the work of
Christ Jesus. This is how grace operates. It operates by crossing over.

On one side of the Red Sea, the Israelites are still within
the reach of their old false ruler. Pharaoh is coming to kill them. They’re
under a sentence of death. But as they crossed over, they crossed over from
death to life.

God did all the work and they just had to “go forward”–they had to cross over.
Cross over when God told them it was time. This is how Christianity is
different from every other religion. Every other religion is trying to build a
bridge to get across, trying to work hard enough to make it to the other side.

With Christianity, however, one minute you’re not saved—the
next minute you are. One minute you’re not adopted—the next minute you are.
Have you ever been adopted or known someone who was adopted? You either are or
you aren’t. You’re not partially adopted. You’re either in the kingdom of
darkness or you’ve been transferred into the kingdom of God, the kingdom of
light.

There is no in between, no middle ground.

Did you understand this? A lot of people don’t. Some of you
probably don’t. A lot of people, when asked whether they’re a Christian, will
say something like, “Well, I’m trying.”

Nobody’s a Christian from trying. To be a Christian is to
receive a change of status. Once you were not a member of the family of God,
now you are a member of the family of God. Once you were not born again, now you
are. Once you were not justified, now you are.

Not because you deserve it. Not because you’ve earned it.
Not because of your goodness. Look at the apostle Paul. Paul was a Pharisee who
killed people—until he met Jesus on the road to Damascus.

The salvation that Jesus offers is the same kind of
salvation that God’s people experienced when they came out of Egypt. In both
the OT and the NT salvation is deliverance. In its most general sense salvation
in Christ is a rescue. And in order for us to be rescued, it is necessary for
Jesus to destroy our enemies, just as God destroyed the Egyptians in the waters
of the Red Sea. Salvation is never complete until the enemy is destroyed, for
while the enemy lives, it continues to pose a threat to the safety of those who
have been saved.

As we read the entire story of the Exodus, we find that in
one man, Moses, we have a man who so identifies with the Israelites that their
guilt is upon him even as, as the same time, he is so identified with God that
God’s power is coming through him. We have a foreshadowing of Jesus, Son of
God. Moses, like Jesus, is the man in the middle.

In Jesus, however, we don’t have a man who is fully man and
close to God. We have a mediator who is fully God and fully man. A mediator who
is never, even once, rebuked for sin.

When Jonah was in the boat and the storm of God’s wrath was
about to sink the boat, Jonah tells the sailors to thrown him in so they can be
saved. They threw him in and they were saved.

Jesus said, “someone greater than Jonah is here,” speaking
of Himself. It means that Jesus Christ, Son of God, was on the Cross thrown
into the ocean of God’s wrath. All the plagues came down on Jesus; darkness
came down on Him. Jesus was crossing over so that we too could cross over. So
that we, too, could be saved.

When God said, “I brought you out of Egypt so you can be
holy,” He’s saying that we’re saved by faith alone, but not by faith that
remains alone. We’re called to be His people that we can be a blessing to the
whole world. And so in His call to be holy, we’re called to do the works that
will cause us to be a blessing. We see this foreshadowed in the Exodus
story—this is the amazing gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. We’re called to go
forward until we really believe that the blood of the Lamb, Jesus Christ,
cleanses us from all our sins.